Two Voices Are Heard After Years of Futility

ONE is a self-effacing lawyer with an upbeat outlook and an easy smile, the other a firebrand lawmaker willing to stare down the rich and the powerful. Together, Yuichi Kaido and Mizuho Fukushima are perhaps the country’s most prominent pair of antinuclear activists.

For three decades, the couple were at the forefront of an often futile fight against the utilities that operated the nation’s reactors, the corporations that built and maintain them and the politicians and bureaucrats who enabled them. Yet in case after case, judges rejected Mr. Kaido’s claims that Japan’s nuclear reactors were dangerous. In Parliament, the nuclear lobby routinely carried the day, casting aside the antinuclear platform of Ms. Fukushima’s Social Democratic Party.

That stasis was shattered by the tsunami that wrecked the reactors at the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima. An overwhelming number of Japanese, for years ambivalent about nuclear power, are now calling for the country’s remaining reactors to be shut down. Politicians, even those backed by the nuclear industry, are scrambling to reposition themselves.

Once a proponent of building more reactors, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for nuclear power to be phased out. In a perverse way, the tragedy represents an opening of sorts for Mr. Kaido and Ms. Fukushima, who applaud the prime minister for backing their cause. Yet after years of frustration and mindful that change comes slowly in Japan, where consensus-building is critical, Mr. Kaido and Ms. Fukushima are far from declaring victory.

“I understand that the decision that Prime Minister Kan made carries special importance,” Mr. Kaido said. “The direction is correct, but I wish he would complete the proper process. He should share his ideas with the public.”

The rising antinuclear tide in Japan, they said, came at great expense. As a result, they feel humility, not pride.

“I thought my life was a failure right after March 11,” Mr. Kaido said, referring to the date of the earthquake and tsunami. “I have devoted myself to legal cases and antinuclear activities to prevent this kind of accident, but I could not prevent the worst from happening. It was an agonizing feeling.”

BUT Mr. Kaido and Ms. Fukushima, who were both born in 1955, also take the long view, a necessity for anyone trying to change the way the country’s most powerful companies and lawmakers do business. “Although I won’t be able to change the past, I think I can change the future,” Ms. Fukushima said. “We must change decision-making in politics.”

Mr. Kaido and Ms. Fukushima decided long ago to devote themselves to this goal. Both came from comfortable homes and attended top schools that could have provided an entree into more lucrative professions (although according to public records, they had a combined $3.1 million in assets in 2009). But both were growing up during the late 1960s, when Japan’s fledgling environmental movement was taking shape. The events of the times led them to left-wing causes and a lifetime of bucking the establishment.

Always drawn to the sciences, Mr. Kaido’s interest in progressive politics grew in 1970, after he entered the law department at the University of Tokyo, a steppingstone for the country’s elite. While there, he joined a study group that focused on public interest issues. Guest speakers included Jinzaburo Takagi, the spiritual leader of Japan’s antinuclear movement.

The study group is also where Mr. Kaido met Ms. Fukushima. Though she grew up in Miyazaki, one of the more conservative corners of the country, Ms. Fukushima’s horizons were broader than most — her grandparents emigrated to America and her father was born in Hawaii. As a teenager, Ms. Fukushima learned of the perils of industrial pollution and deadly mercury and cadmium poisoning at the movies, where newsreels were shown before feature films.

Photo

“The accident you said will not occur has just occurred. Are you willing to apologize? ” said Mizuho Fukushima, right, with Yuichi Kaido. Ms. Fukushima publicly confronted Haruki Madarame, a Japanese nuclear safety official.Credit
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

“The news was a cue for me to become a lawyer,” Ms. Fukushima said. “At that time, I thought Ralph Nader was hip. I admired him as an activist and an attorney.”

While their classmates took jobs at bastions like the Ministry of Finance and the nation’s top banks, Mr. Kaido and Ms. Fukushima chose to fight those powers. Mr. Kaido has also represented immigrants, prisoners and, more recently, Greenpeace activists.

But it can be a lonely battle, given how smothering big business, big government and the mainstream news media can be. And taking on powerful interests can come at a cost, as Mr. Kaido learned when he was shown on television handing out antinuclear leaflets in front of a train station in Tokyo.

His father, an executive at Mitsubishi Electric, which made components used in nuclear power plants, warned him to avoid public protests because it would jeopardize his own career. After the explosion at Three Mile Island, he again told him to stop his protests because the accident would surely force the government to shut the country’s reactors.

“I vowed to continue these activities as a lawyer, though I felt sorry to trouble him,” Mr. Kaido said.

HE also had a run-in with Ms. Fukushima’s mother, who urged him to register for a marriage certificate. The trouble was that Ms. Fukushima did not want to give up her maiden name and Japan’s civil code demands that spouses share the same last name. So the couple have not married. Their daughter, who is in law school, took Mr. Kaido’s family name.

The right to keep one’s name is one of many feminist causes that Ms. Fukushima has championed. She has also pushed passionately for protections against sexual harassment, better care for people with AIDS and greater gender equality. She also became a popular television commentator and won a seat in the upper house of Parliament in 1998. In 2003, she took over leadership of the Social Democratic Party.

The party has long opposed nuclear power, and Ms. Fukushima has been particularly outspoken since the nuclear crisis began. She has called for a firewall between the nuclear regulators and the ministry that promotes the industry, and has clashed with Haruki Madarame, the chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, and Masataka Shimizu, the former president of Tokyo Electric Power.

“The accident you said will not occur has just occurred,” Ms. Fukushima said to Mr. Madarame in public hearings. “Are you willing to apologize?”

Mr. Kaido has to pick his battles more deliberately. In one attempt to shut the troubled Monju fast-breeder reactor, it took him seven years just to be certified to try the case. He won a case involving a reactor in Fukui Prefecture that reportedly had inadequate protections against earthquakes, but that ruling was ultimately overturned. Another high-profile case that aimed to close the aging Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka failed in 2007.

“The Supreme Court, in order to continue the operation of nuclear plants, can disregard the facts they don’t like or, in some cases, rewrite the facts,” Mr. Kaido said. “They seem to love the nuclear industry that much. Maybe the Supreme Court views the nuclear industry as a state policy, so they have to protect it.”

Still, Mr. Kaido said that the events of March 11 had so clearly exposed the dangers of nuclear power that the courts would not be able to ignore his arguments, even if it took years to try cases.

“The Supreme Court now realizes they were wrong, so now we have a chance to win,” he said. “There is a hope we can stop these dangerous power plants from now.”

Correction: August 27, 2011

The Saturday Profile article last week, about Japan’s most prominent pair of antinuclear activists, Yuichi Kaido, a lawyer, and Mizuho Fukushima, a lawmaker, misidentified Ms. Fukushima’s political party. It is the Social Democratic Party, not the Socialist Party. The article also misstated the location of a nuclear reactor that Mr. Kaido had sought to close through a lawsuit. The reactor, Monju, is in Fukui prefecture, not Shiga. And the article referred incompletely to the outcome of the lawsuit. While Mr. Kaido won in a lower court ruling in 2003, the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 2011, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Two Voices Are Heard After Years Of Futility. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe